Siena Heights’ Creative Stages program celebrates 50th anniversary

Sunday

Feb 9, 2014 at 3:00 PM

By Arlene BachanovDaily Telegram Special Writer

In the hallway outside Siena Heights University’s Stubnitz Lab Theater on Feb. 1, a group of costumed children stood, under the watchful eye of a couple of SHU students, waiting to enter the room to be introduced to patrons attending a special reception marking the 50th year of youth theater at SHU. Then, in just a short while, the curtain in the nearby Francoeur Theater would go up on Creative Stages’ 50th anniversary show, “A Midsummer Night’s Midterm.”

One of the group was 14-year-old Rosemary Perkins of Tecumseh, the play’s Queen of the Fairies. Perkins has been in Creative Stages, as the youth theater program is known, since age 6 or 7.

“I like the people (in the program), and it’s really fun,” she said. “I just love being in theater.”

Perkins said she has gained much from participating in Creative Stages: “I’ve learned patience and how to deal with frustrating things. And I’ve learned the show must go on.”

Standing nearby, Michael and Celeste Duncan watched as their oldest son, 11-year-old Dominic, the show’s Puck, came down the hallway in his costume. The Duncans’ other son, 6-year-old Caden, was also in the play — his very first.

The Duncans have definitely seen a difference in Dominic since he first started doing youth theater. He “really gets to open up and be himself onstage,” said Celeste. “It helps him with his confidence. He’s never afraid to speak in front of anyone.”

In fact, she added, laughing, “He says the larger the audience, the better.”

SHU student Amy Garno of Tecumseh helps with the program but also knows what it has done for her own family. Her children, her siblings, and nieces and nephews have all been part of it, and a number of the Garnos, with their love of performing whetted by Creative Stages, have been often seen on stages including the Croswell Opera House.

The program “sparked their love of the arts and drama,” Garno, an art student herself, said of her family. “All of them are involved in music and drama. It definitely sparked their creativity.”

Such testimonials are nothing new to Creative Stages’ director, SHU assistant professor of theater and speech communication Joni Warner, now in her second year with the program.

“You really see kids transform through it,” she said.

And while plenty of participants over the years have certainly gone on to be onstage in theaters like the Croswell or even in professional theater, “It’s not about building performers, but about having kids build self-confidence,” said Warner.

About 85 students are currently in Creative Stages, which is offered in two sessions, fall and winter. The winter classes begin Monday and run through April 24. A summer course is also offered periodically.

The program focuses on children ages 6 to 14 — although high schoolers can take part as well, in a class geared toward teaching advanced theater skills — with weekly after-school classes in what’s called creative drama. Activities vary depending on the age group, but in general youngsters work on learning to tell stories through drama, with Warner and her SHU student assistants guiding them in activities such as role-playing in a given situation. The children become characters in a story and have to figure out what their characters would do as the story unfolds spontaneously.

“You step into a role, unscripted, and you work it out,” Warner said.

Participants also have the opportunity to perform in the annual main-stage production, such as this year’s “A Midsummer Night’s Midterm,” if they wish.

Creative Stages got its start in 1963 under the direction of Sister Therese Craig, an Adrian Dominican Sister who was on the Siena Heights faculty. Craig taught a summer class for teachers — at that time, the class was made up of Adrian Dominicans, who would return to Siena in the summers to take courses — on how to work with children on creative drama. Youngsters took part in the class, and the sisters took what they learned back to their own classrooms.

One of Craig’s students in that first class was Trudy McSorley, who at the time was an Adrian Dominican herself and who later became an SHU theater faculty member and then administrator.

“I started teaching drama wherever I was stationed as a sister,” McSorley said, including working with 100 children a week in Detroit. “It was a thrill to be able to do that.”

Then one day in late 1972, she was asked to return to Siena Heights. Craig wanted to interview her for a position with the program, which at the time was called Studio 6-12 because it focused on that age group and which had grown considerably since it started. McSorley did so, and began teaching at the college in July 1973.

By that time, Craig had received a Kellogg Fellowship to study in England and had spent a year there learning from Dorothy Heathcote, whom McSorley called “the world leader in drama education.”

In that time, Craig studied how actor-teachers went out into the schools to teach creative drama, and so when she came back to Adrian she began taking Siena’s theater and education students into the county’s classrooms to work with children. And when McSorley came on board, she joined in that work, along with creating the after-school program.

“The Therese-Trudy team kept growing the experience,” McSorley said, assisted by SHU students like Julie Dolan. Dolan later followed in her mentors’ footsteps and began working with children’s theater herself, eventually becoming the Adrian Public Schools’ fine arts director.

For 2005 SHU graduate Michael Kirk Lane, who now works for a company that brings theater education to schools in New York City and Jersey City, N.J., assisting with the program as an SHU student under McSorley and her successor, Kerry Graves, “completely informed my philosophy of teaching theater.”

“For years, as schools have cut arts programs due to lack of funding, it’s a vital skill that children miss. They’re robbed of the chance to use their imaginations and to grow in confidence.”

After 30 years with the program, McSorley finally stepped aside to become an administrator at SHU. Graves, an associate professor in the department, was the next to head up Creative Stages.

Graves started out adapting fairy tales for the mainstage productions and then began writing her own plays.

“I wrote the shows over Christmas break every year,” she said. “I had an outline, then we auditioned kids and I wrote the storyline based on who I had, so we could make sure everyone had a part.”

The last part of that statement was true in McSorley’s time as well.

“If a kid wanted to be in the show, they were in the show,” McSorley said. “If they wanted a line, we figured it out. If we needed 25 spiders in ‘Charlotte’s Web’ instead of five, we did it.”

While not every Creative Stages child wants to perform in the play, Graves said she always enjoyed watching the kids who were a little reluctant grow into the task.

“The best thing is the kids who at the beginning don’t think they even want a line, but they try it,” she said. “Then the next year, they take a bigger part. To see that growth from first grade to high school is amazing.”

Besides building confidence and self-esteem and helping children develop their imaginations, Creative Stages teaches important collaborative skills because the participants have to learn to accept each other’s ideas and work together to figure out where the story goes. And “a lot of higher-level thinking occurs through the drama itself,” said Warner, because the youngsters must problem-solve and make decisions.

It also can help students learn how to do anything from cope with something like bullying, through creating a drama that touches on that topic, to resolving conflicts, to “understanding truth and the values you live by,” McSorley said.

These sorts of skills help children in all areas of their lives, from academic to personal, and carries over into adulthood.

In the course of its 50 years in existence, “this work has touched thousands of lives,” she said. That's not only because so many children have directly taken part in the program, but also because countless others have experienced creative drama thanks to the teachers and budding teachers who took the concepts into the classroom. "And every one of them are cherished.

“If I could look back and say, ‘Is there anything else I would have done (in life),’ I would say no.”

Never miss a story

Choose the plan that's right for you.
Digital access or digital and print delivery.